President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  He asked Khomeini how he planned to govern Iran. After a diatribe against the Shah for not following Islamic law, Khomeini declared that he wanted an Islamic state in which clerics would exercise power through Islamic law, with technocrats implementing the fundamentalist agenda. They were like plumbers, he said, and could be replaced at will if they did not faithfully do their job. This young academic had a clearer understanding of Khomeini’s ultimate objectives than did our intelligence services. The ayatollah gave Khalilzad his book, Islamic Republic, copies of his speeches and his taped lectures, and pointed to one photograph he said proved the Shah was an “agent of Zionism,” because he was supposedly seated next to Israel’s Shimon Peres. When Khalilzad looked more closely at the photograph, it showed the Shah at an OPEC meeting not with Shimon Peres, but a very different Perez, the president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez.33

  CONFUSION IN WASHINGTON

  While the post-Watergate reforms of the CIA ruled out assassinations, many other steps might have been taken to restrain Khomeini. Our diplomats could have urged the French not to permit his return to Iran. Our spies could have asked French intelligence to use electronic surveillance to determine Khomeini’s motives and, for example, learn in advance about his plans to call for nationwide strikes.

  The Shah and Ambassador Zahedi also dismissed the significance of street protests in Iran, which they attributed to Communist manipulation, and believed differed from “disjointed protests” led by religious leaders. Their suspicions were such that Vance felt compelled to assure Zahedi that “the US was not involved in any respect in the plotting against the Iranian government.”34 When the NSC’s Sick was approached by an American academic specialist on Iran who wanted to arrange a meeting with Yazdi, it was vetoed by senior State Department and White House officials lest they give the impression that they lacked confidence in the Shah.35

  With suspicions rising that the Shah’s position was shakier than it seemed, and without sound intelligence on either his motives or Khomeni’s, the State Department finished a major analysis for the president, finding that repeated expressions of American support for the Shah were having no effect, and recognizing the limited ability of the United States to influence events.36 Carter himself had not yet held a single high-level meeting on Iran and was focused elsewhere in the Middle East—on turning the Camp David Accords into a binding treaty between Egypt and Israel.

  Brzezinski chaired a Special Coordinating Committee in the White House Situation Room on November 2, 1978, which he opened by stating that Iran’s Ambassador Zahedi felt that Sullivan was not sufficiently supportive of the Shah. The meeting reached a consensus, supported by the president, to send Sullivan a clear message that the administration supported the Shah “without reservations” and that the Shah needed to act through the military or form a coalition government.37

  However, cracks soon developed in the administration’s policy. There were three competing camps, and even their positions wavered as power shifted inside Iran. Ambassador Sullivan now felt the Shah should leave as soon as possible and that contacts should be initiated with the opposition in Iran and with Khomeini. Vance continued to emphasize negotiations with the opposition and progress to implement the Shah’s reforms, but he was not ready to give up on the Shah.

  Brzezinski, a student of history, believed that restoring order was paramount, and that revolutions develop when reforms precede the restoration of order. Vance agreed that order must be restored before further liberalization, but was preoccupied by SALT and Middle East negotiations and delegated Iranian responsibility to others.38 Brzezinski argued that only a show of force by the Shah could save the day, and he saw Vance and the State Department ready to make concessions to the students, mullahs, and the bazaar merchants to achieve a unity government.

  The same division between Vance and Brzezinski that was painfully evident on Soviet policy now hobbled policy making on Iran, with rogue ambassador Sullivan, often acting on his own, added to the mix. Brzezinski later recognized that “sadly there was a duality,” and that “it was up to me or Vance to say one way or the other, but not both ways; but I didn’t do it.”39 Sick found the State Department’s animosity toward Brzezinski to be of “nearly pathological proportions.”40 No wonder the Shah was confused.

  On November 5, 1978, events in Iran took a decided turn for the worse. The army fired at students at Tehran University. Attacks were mounted on Western hotels and businesses by young men encouraged by their mullahs. The British Embassy was overrun and partly burned, and the American Embassy menaced. It is critical to appreciate that the Shah was uneasy about using force against his own people, even though Zahedi pressed him to do so to quell the unrest.41

  But the next day he named a military government headed by Army Chief of Staff Gholam Reza Azhari, although with a remarkably apologetic statement that indicated his ambivalence. Coming from an absolute ruler who had just turned his government over to his generals, it sent a signal of weakness rather than strength. He expressed his support for the people’s revolution, said he had tried unsuccessfully to form a coalition government, and promised to make up for “past mistakes, unlawful acts, oppression and corruption.” Simply naming the military government created a period of calm, but General Azhari had no political background or desire to use force. The demonstrations resumed in late November, as oil-field strikes slashed Iran’s production from 5 to 1 million barrels a day, touching off the second great oil shock of the 1970s and focusing my attention on America’s own domestic turmoil of long lines at the gas pumps that began later in the winter.42

  Then, on November 9, Sullivan sent a long and explosive top-secret cable to Washington provocatively headed “Thinking the Unthinkable,” urging withdrawal of our support for the Shah and forecasting that he could not survive unless the growing unrest was quickly subdued. This was the first in a series of frantic and essentially uncoordinated attempts by Sullivan on his own to prepare moderate Iranian political leaders to fill the vacuum that would be left by what he believed would be the Shah’s inevitable departure.43

  When the cable made its way to the White House, Carter was irate. He asked Brzezinski how the situation could have become so degraded without his knowledge, especially since no one had warned him that the Shah’s position was as dire as Sullivan reported directly from Tehran. In response to a personal presidential note, CIA Director Turner later told me he defended his agency by declaring that it concentrated its limited resources on the Soviet threat to Iran, not on internal Iranian politics, which were off-limits to the agency anyway. He blamed the embassy staff for failing to maintain contacts with the opposition and the clergy for fear of offending the Shah.44

  Carter tried to find his own way out of the confusion by asking Senate Majority Leader Byrd, who was in the region, to make a side trip to Tehran, and also asked Treasury Secretary Blumenthal, who was leaving for a long-planned trip to the Middle East, to meet with the Shah. Both returned with gloomy reports. The Shah told Byrd: “It is a deep internal matter here, and all the best statements from Washington, London and Bonn cannot change that.”45 Blumenthal was even more dramatic. A year before, he had met a confident Shah who lectured him on the permissiveness of Western societies. Now he found Iran’s ruler lapsing into embarrassing periods of silence, staring “vacantly into the distance…” and seemingly “immobilized by fear and indecision, unable to lead and no longer in control.” He plaintively asked his visitor: “What does the president suggest I do?” Blumenthal followed up his written report by meeting with Brzezinski, who asked Blumenthal if he thought the military could contain the opposition, and then told him that no one in Washington really understood Iran well enough to provide a hardheaded analysis.

  On Blumenthal’s recommendation, and with Brezinski’s agreement, George Ball, a Washington lawyer, diplomat, and establishment wise man who also was celebrated for bucking the consensus—as he had when he resigned as Lyndon Johnson’s deputy secretary of state because he
opposed military escalation in Vietnam—was called in to conduct a full examination of our Iran policy. Ball holed up in the Executive Office Building, read all the cable traffic, and was briefed by State Department’s experts as well as those outside the government. To Brzezinski’s chagrin, Ball concluded that the Shah could not be saved with his full powers, and that the relatively moderate National Front should be installed to block Khomeini, with the Shah retaining his throne and his control over the military. But the CIA’s own report on the National Front offered little hope: It was not a cohesive group, but contained parties ranging from moderates to radical leftists, although not the Communists. The CIA finally got it right, but with a disastrous conclusion: Khomeini commanded the largest support from the demonstrators, and the National Front leaders were moving closer to Khomeini’s position.46

  More decisive than all of Washington’s internal maneuvering, however, was an unscripted blunder. At a breakfast meeting with reporters on December 7, Carter was asked if the Shah could survive the radical revolution; the president seemed to back away from the Shah in a devastating way: “This is something that is in the hands of the people of Iran. We have never had any intention and don’t have any intention of trying to intercede in the internal political affairs of Iran. We primarily want an absence of violence, and bloodshed, and stability. We personally prefer that the Shah maintain a major role in the government, but that is a decision for the Iranian people to make.”47 This sent an unintended signal that Washington was distancing itself from the Shah and leaving decisions not to him but to the “people of Iran”—the ones who were already in the streets demonstrating against the Shah. Carter’s remarks sent the Shah into another round of depression and only emboldened the opposition.

  The president nevertheless corrected himself and was upbeat at a December 12 news conference: “I expect the Shah to maintain power in Iran and for the present difficulties to be resolved. The predictions of disaster that came from sources have not been realized at all. The Shah has our support and he also has our confidence.” The next day Ball met privately with Carter and was more blunt than in his written report. He said the Shah was finished, and there was “a national regurgitation by the Iranian people” that extended to the professional and middle classes. He urged the transfer of power to “responsible hands before Khomeini comes back and messes everything up.” He proposed a council of prominent citizens to pick the leaders of a new government and handed the president the names of several dozen possibilities.

  Ball also recommended that the Shah temporarily leave the country but remain as commander in chief of the army. Carter rejected his advice on the ground that “I can’t tell another head of state what to do.”48 Critics who argue that Carter failed to support the Shah are wrong; if anything, some like Ambassador Sullivan and George Ball, felt he hung on too long in standing with the Shah and his regime. But Carter certainly stayed in the Shah’s corner. Yet the president’s continued public expression of confidence in the Shah satisfied no one in the administration. Brzezinski persisted in his hard line: Only the military could save the day by imposing order to give the Shah time to reform his autocracy, and he drafted a letter for Carter to so advise the Shah.

  Vance immediately called Carter and warned that Brzezinski’s tough language would be interpreted by the Shah as an invitation to mass violence. Carter was caught in the middle, with Vance endlessly seeking diplomatic solutions, and Brzezinski urging the use of military might to accomplish diplomatic ends. Vance edited Brzezinski’s proposed letter to make it more ambiguous—not what was needed at this critical time, but in the end the message was never sent.49 The Shah did not order a crackdown, and Sullivan was furious that his recommendation to commence contacts with the opposition was never approved. The Shah and the United States were woefully outmaneuvered by Khomeini, who masterfully used the youthful Iranian extremist phalanx that soon seized the U.S. Embassy.

  CLARITY FROM THE AYATOLLAH

  But if the Shah was indecisive and the U.S. government divided, one man was certain of his goals: Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. On November 19, Morteza Motahiri, a celebrated cleric, writer, and Islamic scholar at Tehran University, as well as one of Khomeini’s closest friends, left for France with a message: The military crackdown was frightening Iranians away from further strikes and demonstrations, and he urged Khomeini to declare a jihad against the Shah. As a grand ayatollah, he had authority under Shia doctrine, and Sazegara saw Khomeini listen carefully and agree, declaring: “Rise up, get guns, and fight with the Army.” As a young revolutionary committed to armed struggle, Sazegara was ready and happy to follow this battle cry and return to Iran and fight.

  But Yazdi, a political activist from Mossadegh’s nationalist party, had a more effective idea, following a tactical debate among Khomeini’s entourage.50 His goal was establishing a free and open Islamic democracy after victory over the Shah, with both secular and religious communities supporting Khomeini, whom he originally saw as an advocate of democratic institutions, without a special role for clerics in the Iranian government. Yazdi routinely met Khomeini every morning and had earned his confidence. He explained to Khomeini that “the jihad order is your nuclear bomb,” that the threat of using it would be sufficient, and that there was no hurry: “Don’t rush for jihad.” Yazdi calmly explained that preparation was essential and cautioned the ayatollah to develop a more sophisticated and what ultimately turned out to be a winning strategy. Khomeini realized that if he invited the Iranian people to wage a holy war, the revolution might not succeed because ordinary people were unable to get guns. And even if the younger revolutionaries managed to take up arms, the army would crush them, and that would be the end of the revolution against the Shah.

  Yazdi proposed that before Khomeini announced a holy war against the Shah, he should first “invite the people to do other things” with far less risk than death under the guns of a superior military force. The ayatollah agreed and drafted a strong public letter in the form of a Shiite religious order to the people of Iran. Rather than engage in open war against the army, the ayatollah exhorted Iranians not to pay their electricity or gas bills to the government-owned utilities and to stay home from work, especially if they held government jobs.

  Khomeini also tried to split the armed forces, the pillar of the Shah’s power: He told soldiers to leave their garrisons and directed officers not to obey their generals as a religious duty. The letter dramatically urged the Iranian people to approach soldiers on the street and ask: “Why do you kill your brothers?” He even warned the wives of army officers that it was “religiously forbidden to you” for their husbands to obey general orders—and for good measure commanded the women: “Don’t cook anything for them, this is against religion.” Sazegara translated the letter into English and French for the scores of journalists swarming around Neauphle, just as he had the ayatollah’s other statements.51

  It worked for Khomeini. People refused to pay their bills. Strikes broke out around the country; Iranians did not go to work. And they took to the streets by the tens of thousands, confronting the ubiquitous army. Mothers brought their young children, carrying some on their shoulders, and gave red roses to the soldiers, sometimes sticking them in their gun barrels. As Sazegara put it: “You know, it is really difficult for the army to kill such a people.” Following Khomeini’s directive they shouted: “My brother in the army, why do you kill your brother?!” The phrase “my brother in the army” soon became the title of a popular Farsi song. This went on for less than a month but wore down the army’s resistance.52

  Sazegara was uncertain whether the army disobeyed the Shah’s order to kill people on the street or he did not want to order them to shoot to kill civilians at all. But it did not matter, because the rebellion spread unchecked. Even the staff of the government radio and television refused to work. The army tried to take over and get the Shah’s message out, but the soldiers were unable to run the studios. The workers in the electric power plant
did not want to cast the country into darkness, but they created an electrical blackout every night from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m., when Iranians were most likely to watch the news. Workers in the state-owned oil industries joined the strike, depriving the government of a major source of export revenue and beginning the process of upending the U.S. and world economies with the second oil shock of the decade. In a show of solidarity, even wealthy Iranians, the principal beneficiaries of the Shah’s economic reforms, started distributing free food.

  It was now clear that General Azhari had failed to calm the country, so the Shah dismissed him and dramatically offered to replace him with a civilian and secular nationalist. That offer was rebuffed after the Shah refused a demand for immediate parliamentary elections. As his regime crumbled, on December 27 the Shah appointed a new prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar of the largely secular National Front. To counter the new prime minister, Yazdi proposed that Khomeini create a Council of the Revolution, in part to ensure continuity among Islamic militants if anything happened to the ayatollah. It was the skeleton of a parallel Islamic rule that exists to this day.53

  In a bizarre twist, Bazargan and Mohammed Beheshti, two members of the new revolutionary council, recommended that Khomeini join the United States in endorsing the Shah’s choice of Bakhtiar as prime minister. The ayatollah refused as long as Bakhtiar held his appointment from the Shah. He could not serve two masters, and Khomeini demanded that Bakhtiar first resign if he wanted the cleric’s endorsement. Sazegara told me they feared that if Khomeini accepted Bakhtiar as prime minister and called off the strikes and demonstrations, the Shah’s military forces could regain control and then restore the Shah’s regime if he was forced to leave the country—the Shah’s flight and return under CIA auspices in 1953 were still a vivid memory. Sazegara remembers Khomeini saying: “This is our only chance; all the people are mobilized, and we can destroy the regime of the Shah.”